6 Things You Don’t Know About Carpets

You walk on them every day, spill your food on them, call Oxi Fresh for carpet cleaning to make them look good, and spend significant amounts of money replacing them. Yet despite all the time you spend with carpets, how much do you know about them? Probably not too much – after all, the history of carpet cleaning doesn’t usually interest people. After all, there are a lot more interesting subjects, but I dug down deep and managed to scrounge a few fun facts out of the rather dry history of carpets:

The Pazyryk Carpet

1. The World’s Oldest Pile Carpet

Where modern carpets can last over 10,000 years in landfills, the total number of truly ancient carpets out there is very small. That really shouldn’t besurprising, though, since they were made of materials they easily degrade. Amazingly, though, a carpet that’s two and half millennia old has survived. The Pazyryk carpet was found in a funeral mound in the the 1940’s and is, despite it’s age, remarkably well preserved. Normally we recommend carpet protector, but this one doesn’t seem to need it. 2. The World’s Biggest (Handmade) Carpet

This is one Oxi Fresh probably won’t be cleaning any time soon: a 60,546 sq. foot carpet was woven, by hand, in Iran over 18 months. This 1.4 acre, wool-cotton mix carpet was then flown to the Sheikh Zayed Mosque (in two planes) and then had to be stitched together. Oxi Fresh loves commercial carpet cleaninglarge areas, but this ones a wee bit too big.

3. Why We Call It Carpet

The word “carpet” actually came from the famous carpet makers the . . . no not the Persians, but the Armenians. Armenians were some of the earliest carpet makers and many scholars believe the ancient Pazyryk carpet was their handiwork. With their long history, it should come as no real surprise we borrowed their word “kapert/karpet.”

4. Talk About National Pride

Turkmenistan is a nation that has had a long history with carpets and to this day they still occupy an important place in their culture. As a matter of fact, carpet is so important to them that they have it on their flag! On the left hand side of the flag they have what is supposed to look like a strip of carpet with five traditional guls (designs) on it!

5. That’s a Lot of Carpets

When asked about Iran’s economy, most of us would probably mention something about oil. To be fair, that is where they get most of their money. But did you know that Iran’s 1.2 million weavers product about 30% of all handwoven carpets made each year? These are the same people who made the world’s biggest handmade carpet, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

6. What do Renaissance Paintings and Carpet Have In Common?

This one I found rather strange, but pretty cool. Time has never been friendly to carpets, leaving archaeologists very little to work with. That means they have to turn elsewhere for information – but carpet creating nations didn’t have many detailed records about it because to them it was just an everyday activity. But in Europe, carpets were a luxury only afforded by the wealthy. Consequently, carpets began showing up in paintings as a way to indicate the subject’s status, and now historians study the paintings so they can study the carpets in the painting. Weird, huh?

We hope you found this a fun article! Thanks to Wikipedia for all the useful info! And if you want to know more about Oxi Fresh and our green carpet cleaning, post your questions in the comments and I’ll try to answer them.